Did
Jews sent to Auschwitz go to Transnistria (Rumania)
Instead? The Mystery Deepens.

We have
received this material from Romanian
historian George
Popovici,
Adjunct Director of Project Genocide in
Charge of Eastern European and Interethnic
Issues, living in the United States; it
amplifies material posted on this Website
on one of WW.II's significant mysteries --
were tens of thousands of European Jews,
destined for a nameless fate at Auschwitz,
shipped at the last minute to Transnistria
instead?

Popovici writes:
Since Professor
Mayer has
health problems, I have undertaken to
clarify some issues myself. Carol
Iancu, professor of Jewish Studies
from France, writes in an article, "The
Jews of Romania during the Antonescu
Regime as reflected in French Diplomatic
Documents", p. 264, in Randolph L. Braham
(ed.), The Destruction of Romanian and
Ukrainian Jews during the Antonescu Era
(Boulder; Social Science Monographs,
1997) the passages reproduced below. They
were brought to my attention by Professor
Mayer, who knows much more about these
things than I do.

1.

"A telegram sent on
June 22, 1942, by Ambassador
[Jacques] Truelle [the
wartime French Ambassador in
Bucharest] to Paris reports that 8,600
Jews from Holland, 11,600 Jews from
France, and 7,000 Jews from Belgium have
been sent by the Germans to this region
[i.e., Transnistria - G.P.] The
entire operation of this slow process of
putting people to death, a little known
aspect of the Final Solution, is found
here outlined in an arresting
manner:

'Transport seems
to have taken place under horrendous
conditions, and neither children, the old,
nor women were spared. The Jews were
apparently housed in ruined barracks where
German troops had previously been
quartered. Their plight is worse than
wretched. They have brought with them only
50 kilograms of baggage and 10 marks per
person. The German and Romanian
authorities use them for various kinds of
work without feeding them or paying them.
No one is let off, not even the sick or
children, who even if they are only eight
years old are treated as adults. As a
result of this kind of particularly cruel
treatment, mortality rates are about 30
percent per day. Among other things,
various contagious diseases are beginning
to show up in view of the primitieve
housing conditions, without any hygienic
facilities whatsoever. On June 13, the
Romanian authorities on their own sent
4,683 Jewish men, women and children away
from Cernauti'"

I contacted
[SEE
3 BELOW]Radu Ioanid, of the U.S.Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington
(USHMM),
or, more precisely, the second in command
of the division for relations with foreign
countries, and
a specialist on the Holocaust in
Romania.

2.

He classifies
[BELOW]
the source used by Truelle as an
"unsubstantiated rumor". It is not my
purpose to indicate my views in the
dispute between Carol Iancu (in Romanian
"Carol" incidentally means "Charles") and
Ioanid.

Iancu is more
anti-Romanian than Ioanid, and does not
cite a specific document, but only
Document No. x in his forthcoming book,
which might have already appeared.

The importance of
this controversy should not be
underestimated: some Jews who are supposed
to have arrived in Auschwitz were in the
wagons which did not reach that camp, but
instead went to the East, as Professor
Mayer has indicated.

Perhaps they did not
reach Romanian-administered Transnistria,
but nearby areas in the
Ukraine.

It should be kept in
mind that the northernmost area between
the Bug and Dniester Rivers was
administered by the Germans.

The
declassifications of the German radio
transmissions captured by Venona (of the
O.S.S.) might provide us with a great deal
of information, as would the written
documents which comment on the captured
data.

Whatever has been
leaked to me concerning Venona appears in
a number of newsgroups, in one of my
postings
[6q7j7a$8rf$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com],
which has not been commented on by
anybody.

My knowledge of the
subject matter is imperfect, and my
(unstated) point in the postings was
largely that Holocaust historians are
wrong.

My name is George
Popovici, and I am a very distant relative
of Mayor Traian Popovici of
Cernauti. One of my friends has sent me
the following text, which is of unknown
origin. I have read some of your articles,
and most of one of your books, The
Sword of the Archangel, and it is my
impression that you would be the best
authority to whom I should refer the text
below. Please tell me what is accurate and
what is not accurate in it. I am rather
skeptical about much of what is written in
the text. You may assume that I am
generally familiar with the
English-language Holocaust-related
literature on Romania published until
1994, but that I am neither a specialist
nor genuinely up-to-date. Nor do I have
access to the most recent literature or a
deep interest in the topic. My motivation
for writing this letter is mostly based on
curiosity, and my training in history does
not go beyond a few graduate courses.
Since I suppose that you might be busy,
please do not feel obliged to provide me
documentation (i.e., footnotes, names of
sources, etc.). You may answer in either
English or Romanian. Thank you.

Text:I have recently discovered some
interesting materials which I would like
to share with you. First of all, in early
1942, the Romanian Secret Service of
Information captured Ilya
Ehrenburg's message to the Jews of
Poland and Romania to prepare to engage in
anti-Axis activities during the planned
spring offensive of the Red Army. In
connection with the death camps, I would
note that some point before reaching
Auschwitz (and also Treblinka), the cars
of the trains coming from countries such
as France, Belgium and the Netherlands
were decoupled. Some cars went to
Auschwitz, and some went to other places
in the East, including the
German-administered Ukraine and
Transnistria.

4.

According to a document from
1942, 26,200 French, Belgian and Dutch
Jews were shipped to Transnistria up to
some time in the summer (?) of 1942. Most
Belgian Jews deported in 1942, allegedly
to Auschwitz, apparently reached
Transnistria. Reports from 1943, indicate
the arrival of Jews from Theresienstadt to
Transnistria. These people had been sent
to the "model ghetto" from Germany,
Austria, Slovakia, and perhaps Bohemia and
Moravia (I do not remember the details,
although I have the
sources).[1]

The reports also
indicate the sending of Bulgarian Jews to
Transnistria (not all of them went to
Treblinka) in 1943, as well as the
deportation and execution of Polish Jews
by the Germans in Transnistria. It has
been documented by Christopher
Browning that the discussions between
the Germans and the Hungarians also
indicated that some high-ranking Budapest
officials were planning to send 100,000 or
so Jews from Hungary to Transnistria in
1942. On August 8, 1942 a German newspaper
from Bucharest talked about 185,000
deportees to Transnistria. Romanian
documents talk only about 110,033 or
something like 125,000 who got there.

I
have heard of a discussion between a by no
means intelligent Jewish librarian whose
parents had died in Transnistria who was
writing a book on the Holocaust, and who
has connections at Yad Vashem. One always
needs connections to really get access to
documents in Israel. She said that 60,000
Jews were deported to Transnistria in
1942, and she was certainly not smart
enough to come up with that on her own.
When questioned, she was evasive. Since
the Romanians deported only something like
7,000 Jews to Transnistria in 1942, the
rest had to come from
elsewhere.[2]

I could go on and
on, and I would like to document my
statements with sources and documents. I
already have materials from Romania,
France, Russia, the U.S., etc. I can
provide you with more details, and can
cite my sources. Many of the Jews
allegedly gassed at Auschwitz were sent to
the East, shot by the Einsatzgruppen, or
died in horrible conditions in ghettos (in
one place in Transnistria, there was
allegedly a 30% mortality per day,
undoubtedly an exaggeration). Some of them
were sent to Siberia by the Soviets in
1944-1945.

Thank you for your
message. I would have preferred to get the
answer by e-mail, partly so that it could
be posted from my deja-news account. In
addition to that, for reasons related to
privacy, I do not give my address and
phone number. That's why I never sign
petitions. Moreover, the
USHMM
is a government institution, and the
scandal
over Dr. Roth's appointment and
resignation
only reinforces
my desire for privacy.

Moreover, and even
more importantly, I have received
materials which would document much,
though not all, of what is written in the
text.

This is not to say
that I have enough historical discernment
to judge everything, but only that I have
an idea about what happened. At any rate,
your comments also seem to indicate that
there is some, or a lot of, truth to the
allegations in the text. In other words,
my curiosity has been satisfied.

I certainly respect
your privacy and I understand that you
don't want to release your phone number or
address. Since there is a lot of
information on the very important role
played by your relative in the saving of
the Jews from Cernauti I thought that it
would be easier to talk to you on the
phone.

In term so called
the deportation of the Jews from Western
Europe to Transnistria there is no
documentary evidence proving that Jews
deported from various Western or Central
European countries arrived to
Transnistria.

There is one
exception, a document from Quai d'Orsay,
mentioning an unsubstantiated rumor in
this sense.

My affirmation is
based on about 800,000 war time documents
originating from various Romanian,
Moldavian and Ukrainian archives which
exist on microfilm in our Museum.
Alexianu the governor of
Transnistria was very much worried and
aware about every new transport of Jews
deported to Transnitria. Again no trace of
these Jews in the territory under his
administration. Finally not one survivor
from Transistria mentions the arrival of
the Jews from Central and Western Europe
in this territory. I want also to mention
to you two recent books on this subject:
Jean Ancel's Transnistria (Atlas,
Bucharest 1998, 3 vols) and Evreii sub
regimul Antonescu (Hasefer, Bucharest
1997).

Joseph
Schechtman writes in his article
"The Transnistria Reservation", in
YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science
(New York: Yiddish Scientific
Institute, YIVO, 1953), on p. 190-191:
"There are indications that in 1943,
Transnistria began to serve as a kind
of "reservation" for deportation not
only of Romanian Jews, but of Jews from
other Nazi-dominated areas. On February
28, 1943, the London press reported
that thousands of jews who had been
transported from their homes in
Germany, Austria, Slvoakia and the
Czech Protectorate to the "model
concentration camp" at the fortress of
Theresin in the Protectorate, were
being sent to Transnistria.
17
[JTA Bulletin, March 1,
1943] Eight months later, reports
from Bucharest stated that freight
trains crowded with Jews deported from
France, Holland and Belgium "continue
to reach the city of Jassy en route to
Transnistria", where they "are isolated
in camps together with Jews from
Bessarabia and
Bukovina.18
[Ibid., November 1, 1943]Jews from Germany and Bulgaria, as well
as 700 Polish Jews, were among the
deportees of
Mogilev.19
[Ibid., July 23, 1943]" There are some documents,
which have been cited by Radu
Ioanid in 1990 and 1997, which
support the contention that there were
German, Austrian, and Czech Jews
deported to Transnistria in 1942 from
Romania, and that Polish Jews who had
gotten there in unknown ways were
executed in the southern part of the
territory by Germans, but they will be
posted only in a further updating of
this text. It has been documented
by Christopher Browning and by
others that the discussions between the
Germans and the Hungarians also
indicated that some high-ranking
Budapest officials were planning to
send 100,000 or so Jews from Hungary to
Transnistria in 1942. See, for example,
Christopher R. Browning, The final
Solution and the German Foreign
Office (New York: Holmes and Meier
Publishers, Inc., 1978) p. 128 and
passim. On August 8, 1942 a
German newspaper from Bucharest talked
about 185,000 deportees to
Transnistria. Romanian documents talk
only about 110,033 or something like
125,000 who got there. The documents
concerning the planned deportations of
most of the Jews of the parts of
(southern) Transylvania (including
Banat and Crisana) which were still
under Romanian rule after the Vienna
Award of August 30, 1940 clearly show
that these movements of population,
which were planned for the latter part
of 1942, had Transnistria, not the
German death camps in Poland, as their
destination. See the documents published in
Felicia (Steigman) Carmelly (on Behalf
of the Transnistria Survivors
Association, Toronto), Shattered! 50
Years of Silence: History and Voices of
the Tragedy in Romania and Transnistria
(Scarborough, Ontario: Abbeyfield
Publishers, 1997), p. 102-107 (both
photocopies of the negatives of the
documents, and their translation into
English). I also received the documents
which Dr. Carmelly or her association
received, from an anonymous source. I
believe that she is probably some sort
of medical doctor; I do not think that
she is an historian. The documents are,
of course, not properly interpreted in
the book. The correct interpretation is
mine. The documents have been cited in
the newsgroups by George Popovici, and
nobody has refuted that this is the
correct
interpretation.[RETURN
TO TEXT
ABOVE]

I
already have materials from Romania,
France, Russia, the U.S., etc. I can
provide you with more details, and can
cite my sources. Gheorghe Buzatu also
shows that the documents in the
archives of the Kremlin talk about the
number of prisoners of war taken by the
Soviet Union between June 22, 1941 and
September 2, 1945. According to the Soviet
data, the Soviets captured 10,173
Jewish prisoners of war. See Buzatu, p.
20-21. I think that this is an
understatement because, for example,
Finnish Jews were probably counted as
Finns rather than as Jews, and because
the number of Gypsies, 383, also seems
unusually low. Many Gypsies were
probably counted as Romanians,
Hungarians, etc., and a number of Jews
might have been also counted as
something else. It is also reasonably clear
that the numbers of prisoners who were
counted is smaller than the numbers of
missing-in-action, and excludes those
who died on their way to the camps. I,
of course, believe that there were gas
chambers at Auschwitz, but the burning
in open fires of Jews indicates that
the gas chambers and crematoria at
Auschwitz could not "handle" the
job.[RETURN
TO TEXT
ABOVE]